INCUBATE announce their Winter Startup Class of 2013

Today the University of Sydney Union’s (USU) leading university startup accelerator program, INCUBATE, has selected the next eight startup teams for it’s Winter cycle. Over the summer INCUBATE helped launch 8 startups in which they collectively were able to raise 1 million dollars in funding.

The winter startups went through a pretty tough selection process and will be mentored by successful Australian entrepreneurs including Matt Barrie, CEO Freelancer.com and Michelle Deaker, Managing Partner at OneVentures – a leading venture capital firm in Sydney.

Michelle explains, “As a mentor for the INCUBATE I was impressed by the achievements of the first program graduates with all going on to launch their businesses and several receiving first funding or trial partners.”

All the startups receive free coworking space on campus and access to a share of $40,000 in equity free funding allowing them to build and develop their ideas, preparing to present at a demo day at the end of the program period.

James Alexander, INCUBATE’s co-founder and Program Manager says “we select the top entrepreneurs from across campus. We have talented students, alumni and researchers with backgrounds in Engineering, Science, Arts and Law. I’m excited to see how their startups develop.”

The only disappointing thing I can see about this line up of what look like very promising business models is the obvious lack of female founders, which especially since it’s a university located incubator I am surprised about, in the last class we saw Whitney Kormor [TheBestDay] and Georgia Kia [WeSit] hit some major goals. This round we only have one female founder Orawan Limnalong [MakeupSocial] amongst a dozen men. With strong female influencers like Deakin on board with the program, it would be great to see more female students with ideas across all disciplines at the university applying for the program in future and even the playing field.

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